Sam Sherman, now 80, was once a tall kid with glasses, red hair and freckles. He graduated in 1952 from Orleans High School, and went on to teach history, English and civics there.

Now, he and one of his students, Pete Norgeot, 73, who graduated five years later in 1958, have taken on a daunting task. The two Orleans natives (technically, Sherman was born at a midwife's house in Eastham) have organized and created the Sam's Scrapbook website of more than 700 old photographs from all kinds of people and situations around town, from the 1950s and earlier.

The photos vary from high school plays to a big house fire to Coach Margaret Lynch with her 1945 high school boys basketball team to class trips to Washington, D.C.

The oldest photos are from the 1890s.

"They're all local people," Sherman said Tuesday at Snow Library. "Mostly Orleans, a little bit of Eastham, a little bit of Brewster. This is mainly Orleans."

In the last several years, Sherman has done the work of unearthing his own old photos and getting copies of photos from many, many people around town. Close to 160 people helped out and chipped in to help identify who's in the photos. In the seven scrapbooks he has created, it's rare to see a blank for a name. Even with an average of 10 people per photo (and that seems on the low side, based on a review of the photos by a Times reporter), he's probably identified more than a couple thousand people.

"You have to remember he was a history teacher," Norgeot said, half-joking, Tuesday at the library. The library has a copy of the seven scrapbooks.

Over the winter, Sherman and Norgeot worked on the new website.

"We spent 40 hours a week, all winter, trying to get this thing done before either one of us croaked," Norgeot said.

"I visited so many people," Sherman said, sounding a little weary and happy at the same time.

In 2002, he returned to the Cape and started going through some of his old photos.

"I'm looking at the people, and I couldn't identify a couple," he said. "So I went to see a friend and showed it to him. Not only did he not know who they were, but he had some photographs, too — with people he couldn't identify. So we went to a third guy, and so on and so on."

Typically Sherman would get a call from someone who knew he was collecting photos, or he'd call somebody about a name. He'd drive to the house, get the photo, go have it copied and then return the photo.

Even on Tuesday, Sherman had six emails out trying to get the name of one person.

"Insanity runs in his family," Norgeot joked. Norgeot got involved when he emailed Sherman after seeing an early version of the website.

"I'm just so pleased that he's doing it," Orleans Historical Society board Chairman Mark Carron said Friday. Carron has seen the scrapbooks and found his brothers in some photos.

"You look at it, and say, 'Oh, yes, I know that person.' The more he gets, the more he finds. It's great that people have that love and desire to do the details that he's doing."

The website can only help, particularly for people who don't live on the Cape, Carron said.

Sherman and Norgeot hope people will contact them with more photos, more names and corrections.

At the library on Friday, Sherman paged through the scrapbooks, telling jokes about girls he'd chased after in high school and his lack of study habits. He told a story about Norgeot's dad, a meat cutter, giving him half of a hot dog. He paged to a picture of the 1958 "Safe Teens" club. "Why weren't you in that, Pete?" Sherman said, joking.

Norgeot's memory of his old history teacher is that he was, well, tall.

"I was tall," Sherman said.

"He was tall." And the first time Sherman walked into Norgeot's class, the room was full of rowdy and noisy kids. "He hiked into the room," Norgeot said. "There was this giant 'Silence...' followed by '...is the absence of noise.'"